Post by Sarah Cockburn
Architecture is such a weighty word – suggesting the statement skyscrapers of London, the baroque piazzas of Venice and the dreaming spires of Oxford, not to mention 7 years training – that we can often forget that it is all around us. As a layperson my impression of Sheffield’s architecture might be lazily described as a few stately municipal buildings interspersed with shabby reminders of the industrial age and brash new developments. Luckily the RIBA’s Love Architecture Festival provided an opportunity for me to be educated about the plethora of contemporary building design in Steel City thanks to a (rather wet) walking tour given by leading lights of the Sheffield Society of Architects.
We started at the Information Commons which less future-forward folk might call the University Library. Marooned on the corner of a busy road it’s hard to appreciate the striking Deco cinema-style design of the building with its well-articulated entrance funnelling students into the centre of learning. On one side a glass frontage provides a view from the café while elsewhere the reading rooms are cocooned in attractive copper oxide cladding with high windows for minimum distraction in the reading rooms. Across the road another University building, Jessop West has a decidedly flatter frontage animated not by different textures or materials but by Rubik’s cube style panels. While this makes the elevation pleasing to the eye the rest of the building feels less well-conceived with the outside spaces remaining awkward and anomalous. Smaller, but demonstrating a perfect marriage of form and function, is the Sound House – a building housing music studios which has turned itself inside out, putting the soundproof cladding usually found inside the studios on the outside to make a black studded cube resembling a speaker.
So much for the University’s architectural credentials but what about the commercial sector? West One was once the great white hope of Sheffield’s city centre – a cocktail of retail, restaurant and living space which would add a metropolitan buzz to the Devonshire quarter. However on this particular Saturday it was looking fairly dead, not just because of the rain but also because of the high churn retail units. But is the architecture to blame? Our knowledgeable guides pointed out that the development had started with strong design principles, creating neat cut-outs and walk-throughs to enable the flow of light, air and shoppers. However, as the residential blocks were built and the money ran out the buildings look more and more blandly identikit. Taking the baton from West One in the mission to make Sheffield a retail hotspot is the fabled Seven Stone development which has been put on hold for so long you have to wonder whether it’s lost a few stone along the way. Our guides stood us in the back yard of Sheffield in the car parks and cleared sites that might one day host this behemoth.
All in all the walking tour provided a fascinating insight into buildings which I have passed on many occasions and barely taken the time to peruse. What is more I learnt a clutch of new phrases such as ‘desire lines’ ‘plinth level’ and ‘atrium’, as well as finding out how architects have to consider all sorts of urban interlopers from pigeons to skateboarders when designing buildings.
You can enjoy more events as part of The RIBA Love Architecture Festival which runs until 24 June 2012, for further details see here.